The world was meant to make sense.
Doubt settled in her lap. She hadn’t been able to keep her promise to the slaughtered buffalo, hadn’t been able to track those killers. What had made her think she could do anything here?
“You should take the animals, go away,” she told Gabriel. “The ancient spirit ignored you, ignored them. You could go, be safe.”
“Probably should,” he agreed. “Not going to. The which you already knew, so let’s be done with that foolishness, all right?”
She felt the scold like a slap, her cheeks coloring as though his hand had in fact made impact. He had made a Bargain with the boss; of course he wasn’t going to leave her.
“All right.” The feathers brushed against her neck as she moved, but for once, they gave no reassurance. She bit down on her lower lip, her hands knotting in the worn canvas of Gabriel’s jacket still draped over her knees, and once again, the texture of it cleared her thoughts.
“Three spirit-animals. The —what did you call it? The wapiti, to remind me of my duty. The Reaper, to tell me to save myself. And the snake, to say . . . nothing useful.” She considered those words, then changed them. “Nothing obviously useful. But it follows us—for amusement, or is there something below its words that I’m not hearing?”
“ ‘Our friends are not always friends, our enemies not always a danger.’ That’s what it said before.”
“You thought it meant Farron.”
Gabriel chuckled. “I did. But reading anything too narrowly runs the risk of missing the evidence.”
She didn’t quite understand what he meant, but the way he said it reminded her of something else. “The boss always said advice was only worth the intent of the person giving it. And every person who bothered to give advice had something they intended by it.”
“He’s had a long time to study human nature.” Gabriel’s voice was dry, but she could hear the humor underneath and clung to it. So long as Gabriel could joke, she could believe there was hope.
“I want to leave,” she admitted quietly, not looking at him, not looking at anything in particular. The fire crackled and snapped, and one of the horses groaned quietly. “I want to throw my pack on Uvnee and ride out of here and never look back. Go . . . anywhere. Go north. Leave the Territory.”
Abandon her Bargain. Just the thought chilled her, made the lines on her palm feel like they were carved of ice, like she’d never be warm again.
“Will you?”
She swallowed, her mouth and throat too dry to work properly. “No.”
Saying the word eased something inside her, and only then did Isobel acknowledge that she might have, that she had been that close. But even if she had, the Contract could not be broken.
Next to her, Gabriel sighed, and there was something in that exhale that was more than relief, more than satisfaction or regret.
“Gabriel?” She had to stop and take a sip from the canteen, to moisten her throat enough to speak again. “Would . . . Would I have been able to leave the Territory?”
She had never considered it, never had cause to once she’d chosen to make Bargain, to stay. But now the question pinched at her.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But . . .” There was a hesitation. “Even if you left, I don’t think you’d be able to stay away. Not for long. Not and remain sane.”
There was pain there, and a story. She rubbed at the flesh of her palm with her thumb; the gesture that had been comforting, before, now felt like the tug of reins at her neck, a bit in her mouth.
Some folk left the Territory, gave up whatever they’d hoped to find and left. Her own parents had come and then gone again, leaving her behind.
“You should leave,” she said again. “Not the Territory, I mean . . . here.” She made a vague motion with one hand, meaning the meadow they were in, and the valley they’d traveled through to get there, all the way back to Duck’s village, and maybe even before. “At least until I . . . do what I need to do.”
He said something in a language she didn’t know, pungent in tone, then, “You said it ignored me. And the horses. We’re not at risk.”
“For now. The haint . . . Something wards it here, contains it. But it’s not . . .”
“It’s not a friend,” Gabriel finished for her, and she nodded. Sky and bone, they had pressed against her when she tried to reach the haint, had done something to her when she was within it, changed her . . . but the memories were mist-swept, foggy, and she was afraid to look closer.
“And you won’t leave.” It wasn’t a question, but she shrugged helplessly, then looked up at him. “The sorrow and the pain. If I don’t ease that, this meadow, this entire valley . . . nothing will come back. Nothing will live here.” She paused, wondering how she knew that but knowing it all the same.
“You’re not going to try and reach it again.”
She would have argued with him, save that he was right. If she tried again and whatever had protected her before failed, the haint would consume her easily as the Reaper hawk ate a rabbit. “There’s one thing I can do, I can try to do. But I’ll need to summon the magicians.”
Gabriel sat down next to her, his hands resting on his knees, and she had a moment’s irritation that he could do that so easily, without having to worry about skirts tangling. “You said the remaining ones had fled; even if you did track them down, they owe no allegiance to your boss; you have no hold over them.” Unspoken: that if they’d scattered, each looking out only for themselves, it would take them a lifetime, or more, to find them.
“Not them,” she said, pressing her thumb deeper into the sigil until it hurt. “The ones who died.”
Gabriel made her promise to wait, to rest, but neither made even a token effort to sleep that night. Their bedrolls untouched, they sat by the fire and listened to the horses grumble and snore, the mule’s occasional flatulence loud in the too-quiet night air as the moon rose overhead and passed through the sky, the stars faded, and the first hint of pale red appeared in the east, heralding the return of day.
Isobel’s eyes were still sore and crackly, her nose was running, her legs ached, and her back felt as though she’d been riding hard for a week, not sitting on soft grass next to a warm fire. She had taken her boots off at some point, and her toes were cold, and her scalp itched, reminding her that it had been days since she’d been able to wash her hair, and the cleaning powder she’d been given was long gone.
“Devorah was right,” she said. “I’d kill for a bath right now.”
It was the first either of them had spoken in hours, and the sound of her voice made Gabriel jump.
“I could find water for you if you needed,” he said finally. “The stream isn’t enough, but . . .”
“When we’re done,” she said. “When we’re done, we’ll ride down out of here and find a town with a proper bathhouse. With soap.”
Her words had the feel of an oath, the weight of inevitability, and she took some comfort in that. She would get her hot bath. And soap. And everything that came with that.
When they were done. If they were still alive.
“Best get to it, then,” Gabriel said, although he didn’t move.
Isobel groaned and reached for her boots.
What she planned to do wasn’t forbidden, either by Territory Law or the devil’s Agreement. It was simply . . . wrong. The dead were to be respected, protected. Boneyards were warded to ensure that, the rituals performed to allow spirits to be at rest, not linger in the pains of the living.
But magicians . . . could they ever truly rest? They gave themselves over to the winds in exchange for power, let madness fill them like a fever, and she had seen how they did not die easily, if at all.
Except they had died here. Died and been trapped with the creature they’d sought to summon, unable to break free, unable to pass on. Had it been their own working that trapped them mid-death? Or something else?
And the haint . . . its bones were likely so ancient, they no
t been warded at all, the rituals unperformed. Whatever she did could affect it as well, and to what end she could not imagine.
“I should be accustomed to uncertainty by now,” she said, torn between resigned bitterness and dark amusement.
“The surest way to get killed is to stop to think about what you’ve already decided to do,” Gabriel said, not looking up from his task. “You’ve been given the tools for the job, Isobel. Trust that.”
She looked at him, carefully scraping grains of salt from the stick, gathering them onto a scrap of cloth, and then looked up at the sky, thinking about what he had said. About trust, and tools, and if the boss had truly sent her out unprepared. If Marie, who had likely packed her things, would have sent her out unprepared, without whatever she might need.
Opening the pack she’d just taken off the mule, she dug her hands deep along the sides, trusting instinct, sliding questing fingers past her journal and pencil, past the seemingly essential odds and ends she’d taken with her from her bedroom and never unwrapped, until her fingertips found a bundle wedged into a corner of the pack, slick and hard and unfamiliar, and curved her fingers around to pull it free.
The object inside the wrappings was not more salt, or silver, or anything she recognized, merely a stone a little longer than her hand and wide as three fingers, worn flat on either side, the ends blunted. It felt smooth to her fingertips, but there were figures etched into one side, the lines stained a deep red. If she looked too long at them, she felt dizzy—the same sort of dizziness she felt when she reached too far into the bones, went too far from herself.
Isobel was certain it hadn’t been among the things she’d packed, and equally certain, although she hadn’t asked, that Gabriel hadn’t brought it with him or picked it up along the way.
She rubbed the pad of her thumb across the wrapping, feeling it slick and cool, and thought, not without some unease, that it might have been a parting gift from Farron.
She closed the cloth back around it, wrapped it again in an old stocking that needed darning, and shoved it deep into the pack. They were not in such need yet that she would test a magician’s gift, however it was meant. But neither would she toss it away.
“Here,” Gabriel said, closing the bundle of salt grains to make sure none spilled before he was ready. “Not that I’m certain salt is enough to keep magicians from more mischief. I’d be more pleased if we’d enough silver coin to ring them in as well.”
They’d been over this already, the coins they had, polished and replaced in Gabriel’s pocket, already beginning to tarnish.
Silver warned and silver cleansed, but it could not compel.
“They summoned a force of wind and fire,” she said. “Summoned it, trapped it, tried to force it against its will to submit to theirs.” Insult thrice over. “And it in turn tore them to shreds. Releasing them from that would be a kindness. I only need make them understand that.”
She moved past him, picking up a charred stick where it lay in the smoldering remains of their fire, letting it drag against the ground as she moved with a measured pace, steering well clear of the dead grass and the swirling steam rising through the dirt.
“I’m not certain they’ll see it that way.” Gabriel dropped the remains of the salt stick onto her pack and studied the bundle in his hand, then looked up at the sky dotted with pale strands of clouds drifting southeast. “They’re mad to begin with, magicians, and I doubt being dead has soothed them in any way. Do you truly think, even within a warding, you will be able to control what comes to your call?”
“No.” She saw no point in lying. “I might have been able to stop Farron one on one. But he was as curious as he was mad, and seemed fond of me —that would have worked in my favor. More than one . . . only if they were distracted. If they turn on each other, I might . . . but if I waited to challenge the survivor, they would be so glutted with stolen medicine, I would fail and die.”
Gabriel put his head down into his hands as she spoke. Isobel ignored him.
The only way to stop another magician was to steal their power. Only another magician was mad enough to try that; the eight winds did not respect flesh or blood and wore down even earth’s bone. Having brushed against the winds, Isobel wanted no part of it. But power could be emptied from a thing. That was how crossroads were kept safe; part of a road marshal’s obligation was to test and drain them as they rode through. A magician was a container for power; all she had to do was empty them.
Marshals were trained, Gabriel said. If a marshal had ridden here, would they have sensed something was wrong, known what was wrong?
Isobel glanced at the sigil in her palm, then down to the sigil she was tracing in the grass. The circle-and-tree badge of a road marshal tied them to the Road; they were bound to the Territory by their oath. Her sigil obligated her to the devil directly. But Gabriel’s comment, that even if she left the Territory, she would not be able to stay away, had felt too true to ignore. Something within her echoed with it, the rolling plains and jagged mountains, the woods and the creeks, the pulse that she’d felt the first time she touched the bones, felt the Road, saw a buffalo herd, heard the cry of an owl in the dawn.
“You bear the mark, and the weight of that obligation,” the wapiti had said, in this same place, not a day before. “The Territory must be protected.”
Because she was the Hand? Because she was the nearest it could find? Because she was fool enough to listen?
Even as she drew the wards in the grass, prepared herself for what was to be done, the Reaper hawk’s warning lingered. The doings of magicians were none of the devil’s concern, and the welfare of natives was none of the devil’s agreement; they had their own medicine folk for such things. What had the Broken Tongue’s people done when the ground shook? They had run.
Isobel very badly wanted to run.
Instead, she completed her circuit, the boneyard markings unfinished to allow the dead to enter, then waited while Gabriel echoed the external circle with salt twice.
“If anything breaks through one line, do you think a second will stop it?”
The look he gave her could have stopped a hungry bear in its tracks.
“If I had the salt for a dozen lines, I would draw them,” he said, his words tightly bitten off. “And shift a stream alongside to boot. This is a fool’s idea, you’re a fool for doing it, and I’m a fool for allowing it.”
He wasn’t angry, though he sounded it; he was worried. Fools die. It was a joke, a curse, a warning. A reminder.
“Ward yourself and the animals, too,” she said. “Just to be safe.”
He nodded, holding up the flap of cloth to show that he’d crumbled enough salt for that, too.
She waited until he had hobbled the animals and warded the circle around them, before she settled herself at the center of her own warding, her legs tucked under her, skirt wrapped around her legs to keep them warm, her spine as relaxed as she could make it, shoulders rounded and soft, head bowed until the line from the back of her neck to her hips was a soft arc. Her hands rested palms-down on her knees as she breathed in and out, in and out, feeling her heart ease and her pulse steady and slow, feeling her blood rise and fall with the movement of her chest, her thoughts thickening and clearing, leaving her soft and strong.
She thought Gabriel was wrong, but he had a point about being careful. Too often they’d been unready, unprepared when she needed to act. This time, she would be settled, as secure in herself as she would be in the saddle before a gallop.
Her hands slipped from her knees to the grass in front of her, fingertips curling into the ground below. Her body followed, leaning forward until she was bent over her knees, her head bowed, her breath barely moving the grasses in front of her.
The boss’s voice rolled in the back of her memories, the lessons she hadn’t realized were lessons, listening to him speak while they did their chores, at night after the saloon had closed. Power—medicine, magic —lingered where it had been used, like
ash after a fire. Anyone with a patch of silver and some sense could tell if power lingered and avoid it. Avoid anything that used it. Like magicians.
Like her. The thought was bitter in her mouth.
But magicians took from more than crossroads. They took from one another—no loss to the rest of the Territory, so long as they kept their battles somewhere isolated. But they were greedy, hungry. They’d take from anything they could. Farron had been ready to consume the spell-beast they’d found if Isobel hadn’t warned him off. He’d threatened to consume her if she faltered.
She might have been able to fend him off. One magician. Maybe.
Isobel let that thought go, feeling it ease out of her, sliding down her spine and fading away, leaving her thoughts thick and clear again. She wasn’t trying to defeat magicians nor steal from them. She wanted to help them.
Even they, even crazed, would not be so foolish as to try to steal from the devil once they recognized the source. But the power within her would draw them close enough.
Her palms made contact with the grass, then the dirt below. There was a sting against her, like a sharp blade slicing down to bone, a queasy shock, and she had learned not to push too deep, half-anticipating that void, that refusal again.
I don’t want you, she told it. I will not interfere with your captive. Let me pass.
There was a timeless hesitation, suspended, and then she slipped through the barrier, careful not to touch it and risk rousing the spirit. Safely inside, Isobel set the lure of her own spark, inviting the restless dead to come to her.
They swarmed.
push shove grab hold tug push. the sharpness of insubstantial fingers digging into her clawing at her, nails scraping claiming pressing. A flash of heat warned them off, the devil’s sigil flaring in the nowhere-place they were, a waft of tobacco and sulphur, soap and spice, the flickerthwack of cards turned on felt, the clink of fine glassware and the soft murmur of voices speaking needs wants secrets, the feel of blood welling on her fingertip, pressed against fine parchment, the touch of the Devil’s hand on her own, and the grabbing, grasping sensation retreats, not to disappear but to wait, impatient, overeager, for another chance.
The Cold Eye Page 17